Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary

This is hardly a movie at all, just 90 minutes of a well-put-together 81-year-old woman talking directly to the camera, about her first job 60 years ago, her boss, and her coming to terms with what she knows of the business in retrospect. Simply distilled from hours of head-on footage of Traudl Junge breaking silence and offering expiatory testimony shortly before her death, without further embellishment, the film assumes dimension when viewed in conjunction with two others. The straightforwardly penitent Traudl could hardly be more of a contrast with an evasive and self-justifying Leni in the queasily fascinating documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). And her eyewitness account of the final days in Hitler’s bunker was clearly a primary source for Downfall (2004), in which Bruno Ganz brilliantly impersonates an all-too-human Fuhrer. Though more document than documentary, Blind Spot illuminates the ambiguities of its title from within. (2002, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-79.)